word | spirit | world | church
There is no one who is higher than the Lord Jesus. He is Yahweh, God of gods, King of kings, Lord of lords. He is seated on the throne in the heavenly temple and the train of his robe fills the place. There are winged fiery lightning snakes that attend his person and serenade him,… Continue reading High and Lifted Up
If you want to mature, you’re going to have to suffer. Actually, that’s not quite right. You are going to suffer, that’s the nature of life under the sun. Some of that will be petty, some of it will be serious, and (heaven-forfend) some of it will be so psychologically scarring that you’ll be getting… Continue reading Maturity Will Hurt
I love to read. That’s probably not a big surprise, it’s an unusual writer who doesn’t. I read more than most—honestly the stats on how much the average person reads make me sad. This YouGov survey has around three quarters of respondents saying they read a book last year, but the median number of books read a… Continue reading How to Read Books
I’ve argued elsewhere that the Sunday gathering is for worship, but as the priests gather in the Temple they find that the Lord comes to them. The occasion is worship, but we encounter God as he comes to us. As one of the four ‘events’ when God meets us as we worship him, Baptism is part of… Continue reading On Baptism
The Church isn’t in a hurry. Neither should Christians be. You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions. Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t be.… Continue reading Slow down
Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties—witchcraft remains something we are inherently nervous about, sometimes leading to absurd extremes. Which is true… Continue reading Magical Thinking
“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to… Continue reading What is the ‘Land of the Living?’
Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong. Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over, I can’t welcome… Continue reading Put up walls so you can welcome
Churches should embrace the life of God in the Spirit in all its fullness. That means both charismatic spiritual life and the sacramental life of the gathered church. ‘Eucharismatic’ is a term coined by Andrew Wilson in his excellent book Spirit and Sacrament, a portmanteau of eucharistic and charismatic. His book lays out his thesis, but… Continue reading Being Eucharismatic
Once a day dawned dark, the clouds hanging limp like wisps of smoke that clog the lungs after a fire has burned beyond its life. Tear-stained faces watched a man displayed, his torn body nailed to a tree torn from the ground and weeping over its foul fate. His face contorted with pain as his… Continue reading Last Words
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